Production and Broadcast History
Million Dollar Password premiered June 1, 2008 at 8:00 PM Eastern. The initial order of the series consisted of six, hour-long episodes, each comprising two games. These six episodes were taped in New York City's Kaufman Astoria Studios in March 2008. Repeats of the first season aired on Thursdays beginning June 26, 2008, moved to Sundays on August 3 and finished on August 24.
Season two, another six episodes, began on December 18, 2008 with a special Thursday broadcast. The show moved to its regular Sunday time slot three nights later. These games were taped on August 2–4, 2008 at CBS Radford studios in Los Angeles. On January 7, 2009, CBS removed the last two episodes (one featuring Norm Macdonald and Jamie Kennedy scheduled for January 11 and another with Chelsea Handler and Jeff Garlin scheduled for January 25), along with a Season 1 repeat scheduled for January 18, from its schedule. The program returned to the schedule on May 24, 2009. Excluding June 7 for the broadcast of the 63rd Tony Awards, the network ran a mixture of unseen episodes and repeats of Season 1 and 2 episodes on Sundays until the beginning of July. The first four episodes, airing during the official 2008–09 television season, had an average viewership that made the show finish as the 42nd most-viewed program of that season.
Betty White became the first celebrity to play in all American television versions of Password with her appearance on the June 12, 2008 episode. The widow of Allen Ludden, who was the host of the original Password in its various incarnations from 1961 to 1980, she also appeared on December 28, 2008, and was the only celebrity to appear more than once during the show's run. Sande Stewart, the son of Password creator Bob Stewart, was a consultant for the show. Noted cruciverbalist Trip Payne acted as the show's "word expert".
On August 3, 2009, during the 2009 Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour, CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler officially announced that there were no plans to renew the series.
GSN originally aired repeats of the series on Sunday nights in mid-2010, later putting the show additionally on weeknights for a few weeks more, until removing the show from the schedule completely. It was then re-added in a Saturday afternoon slot in January 2011. In February 2013, it was again removed from the schedule completely.
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